Google Glasses: Surveillance, Sousveillance, Equiveillance

It is most obvious that technology in general and information and communication technology in particular have a huge impact on privacy and data protection. One even can say that the whole contemporary and on-going debate concerning privacy and data protection started with an intrusion of privacy that was conducted by the use of an artefact of information and communication technology: a simple and old-fashioned camera – at least from today’s point of view. It is quite well-known that this was the starting point of Samuel D. Warren and Louis Brandeis’ hallmark paper “The right to privacy” published in 1890. But actually this debate started even some years earlier when Thomas M. Cooley in 1878 published his “Treatise on the Law of Torts or the Wrongs which Arise Independently of Contract”. In §101 Cooley discusses the violation of the right of privacy and he refers to some cases in which information and communication technology – primarily it is the printing press – was used to invade the privacy of citizens.

Without exaggeration one therefore can say that since more than 130 years there exists a strong relation between technology on the one hand and privacy and data protection on the other. At latest in the 1960s this relation surfaced and got visible for a broader audience with the publication of books like Alan F. Westin’s “Privacy and Freedom” (1967), Lance J. Hoffman’s “Security and privacy in computer systems” (1973), or James Martin’s “Security, accuracy, and privacy in computer systems” (1973). Later on publications, to name only a few, like Whitfield Diffie and Susan Landau’s “Privacy on the line” (1999), Reginald Whitaker’s “The end of privacy” (1999), and more recently, a lot of papers and books by David Lyon and many other scholars on surveillance well established the strong relationship particularly between information and communication technology on the one side and privacy and data protection on the other. All these authors and scholars stress that technology might be and actually is used to invade individual privacy; that such technology endangers freedom and personal autonomy and finally that it might change the very fabric and structure of whole societies.

But if technology is the disease some scholars argue that then even more and more sophisticated technology might be the cure. Our common understanding of surveillance and control most frequently implies that there is some kind of Orwellian ‘Big Brother’ who is watching us. State authorities like the police or secret services are identified as Big Brothers, but insurance companies, search engine providers like Google and companies running social networks like Facebook – generally speaking private companies – are also mentioned. These actors collect, process, and store huge amounts of personal related information and use it in their own interest. Compared to them, we as citizens or consumers are relatively powerless.

To give citizens and consumers more power and to abate or even abolish this asymmetric power relation, Mann, Fung, and Lo (2006: 177) suggested that people shall employ technology for the purpose of ‘sousveillance’ and ‘equiveillance’ as “[…] a peer-to-peer approach that decentralizes observation to produce transparency in all directions.” In brief, sousveillance and equiveillance can be understood as some kind of counter-surveillance or counterveillance which is conducted by ordinary citizens to protest against state and company surveillance measurements. To put it in other words, sousveillance and equiveillance shall empower citizens. However, there can be no doubt that this raises moral and legal concern, as it is openly admitted by Mann and his coauthors: “Naturally, as with any new technology, there will be both advocates as well as opposers. […] we consider, as a base-level of operation, the notion of equiveillance. Equiveillance doctrine says that as long as surveillance is present in the environment, that a person ought to have a moral and ethical right to engage in sousveillance.” (Mann, Fung, and Lo 2006: 179)

It is easy to see that this point of view must raise ethical concerns and even strong objections. From a moral viewpoint the fact that there are people who behave in a morally wrong way cannot be used as a valid justification of one’s own moral misbehavior. Furthermore, attention must be paid to that at least in some countries, for instance in Germany, under certain circumstances it is legally prohibited to take pictures of persons without their informed consent (see §823 BGB; §201a StGB; §§22-24, 33, 37, 38, 42-44, 48, 50 KUG). Taking this into account, Google Glasses already raise some ethical and legal concern since this technology would allow for observations and shooting pictures secretly – it is quite likely that those persons being photographed would not be aware of such actions. Already existing services which make it possible to search for pictures in the Internet and to identify persons would add ethical and legal concerns, particularly because people will lose control over private information (cf. Tavani 2007).

There is another on-going debate concerning the relationship between information and communication technology, privacy, and data protection. The proponents of the so-called post-privacy movement – if one wants to call it a movement –, for instance Jeff Jarvis and, in some sense, David Brin, argue that since technology finally makes it impossible to control who will have access to one’s private information individuals and society simply should abandon the very idea of privacy. Those who argue in favor of post-privacy stress that individuals as well as societies would be better-off if privacy is abandoned: Communication and empathy among people would be strengthened, they would be better informed, and they would share more information and help each other. On the other side, defenders of privacy fear that a post-privacy society would be totalitarian and that there would be a dictatorship of the public and publicity.

As a matter of fact technology in general and particularly information and communication technology, understood in the broad sense of the term, had and has dramatic impacts on individuals as well as on societies. Reformation and Enlightenment had not taken place without the printing press; globalization had not taken place without telegraph, telephone, television, and other modern information and communication technology; many people say that the recent political changes in the Arab world would not have been possible without the Internet and Web 2.0 technologies. But at the same time, without information and communication technology, for instance, the current massive state surveillance executed even in many liberal western countries governed by the rule of law would not be feasible; the same is true with regard to many companies’ invasion of consumer privacy.

At the beginning of the Third Industrial Revolution, often called the ‘information revolution’, societies and governments hoped to be able to rule the use of information and communication technology through legal regulation alone. But already at the end of the last millennium many legal scholars realized that this would not be possible. Some academics, for instance Joel R. Reidenberg (1998), hoped that technology itself might be put into service to regulate the use of technology. Others like Lawrence Lessig (1999) mentioned that law is not the only regulatory modality. But these and other attempts to create ideas concerning the regulation of technology finally still are based on the assumption that centralized and nation-centered regulation somehow is feasible.

But Pandora’s Box has been opened and it has to be feared that nobody will be able to close it again. Knowledge and know-how to create large technological infrastructures for the purpose of surveillance and control are today widely disseminated not only among state authorities, institutions, and companies but also among subcultures, communities, groups, and individuals. Emancipatory ideas like knowledge sharing which are inseparable connected to Enlightenment and scientific progress and which themselves just recently manifested in the form of Open Source, Open Access, or Open Innovation supported the proliferation of that know-how.

It is not clear what is or will be worse: Technologies like Google Glasses exclusively in the hands of large private companies or in the hands of countless hackers and nerds, politically uncontrolled secret services, and the like. Equiveillance, sousveillance, or counterveillance were supposed to bring power to the people; Google Glasses could have been another tool for that kind of empowerment. But at the same time, such technology just democratizes surveillance in the sense that almost everybody will be able to conduct large-scale surveillance. Therefore, those of us who believe in the value of individual privacy perhaps should read Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden” again and look out for a small shack in the forests.

References

Cooley, Thomas M. (1907 [1878]): A Treatise on the Law of Torts. Chicago: Callaghan & Company.

Diffie, Whitfield; Landau, Susan (1999): Privacy on the line: The politics of wiretapping and encryption. Cambridge/Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Hoffman, Lance J. (1973): Security and privacy in computer systems. Los Angeles/California: Melville Publications.

Lessig, Lawrence (1999): Code and other laws of cyberspace. New York: Basic Books.

Mann, Steve; Fung, James; Lo, Raymond (2006): Cyborglogging with Camera Phones: Steps toward Equiveillance. In: Proceedings of the 14^th Annual ACM International Conference on Multimedia. Santa Barbara: ACM, pp. 177-180.

Martin, James (1973): Security, accuracy, and privacy in computer systems. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.

Reidenberg, Joel R. (1998): Lex informatica: The formulation of information policy rules through technology. Texas Law Review, 76 (3), pp. 553-584.

Tavani, Herman T. (2007): Philosophical Theories of Privacy: Implications for an Adequate Online Privacy Policy. Metaphilosophy, 38 (1), pp. 1-22.

Warren, Samuel; Brandeis, Louis D. (1890): The Right to Privacy. Harvard Law Review, 4 (5), pp. 193-220.

Westin, Alan F. (1967): Privacy and Freedom. New York: Atheneum.

Whitaker, Reginald (1999): The end of privacy: How total surveillance is becoming a reality. New York: New Press.